


You Never Quite Forgot James Novak

by ialpiriel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, post-8.23, sharing brainspace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-02
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 04:12:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/908764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy and Cas have been sharing headspace for years - but Cas is an angel, and he's dominated for years. Unfortunately, that's only because he's an angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Never Quite Forgot James Novak

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this thing at 1 AM on a train while operating on four hours of sleep and twenty hours of wakefulness.  
> It switches tense.  
> I know.  
> At least it's all spelled correctly.  
> This might be sad. I'm sorry. I was basically delirious when I wrote it.

You had never quite forgotten James Novak. It was hard to, when you lived in his body and had to adjust to his brain chemistry and every time you looked in a mirror it was his face - held a little differently, because you weren't and aren't used to real, protein-and-electricity muscles.

Just because you didn't forget him doesn't mean you didn't discount him.

You forgot, in six years, how strongly Jimmy believed. He believed in God and in you enough to do what you asked, even when he had no guarantee it was the correct thing to do.

You forgot that sheer force of will.

When you fell before - it was slow, and you had time to get accustomed to it, and it didn't last very long. This time, it's fast, and painful, and you spend a week curled up alongside the train tracks in Michigan, unable to fathom exactly what you just participated in. Jimmy has never completely gone away, but you stopped counting him as a separate thought process in those few minutes you shared a vessel with the leviathans. Maybe it started even earlier than that, when Jimmy almost died.

You don't remember exactly when you stopped thinking of Jimmy in the present tense.

It was a while ago.

Falling, this time, was different.

Your angelness had been what made you unique. You were just another crazy rebel - seen a million times in human history - without your Grace.

You lost a lot when that was ripped from you. It was a gaping, bleeding, open wound when you fell, whether or not Metatron healed up your neck and left you without a mark.

You had forgotten Jimmy though. You had forgotten Jimmy and his deeply-held resentment for you. You had forgotten what faith will drive a man to do, and what taking away that faith will drive a man to do in the other direction.

The first week you spend in a ditch, getting rained on and muddy and pelted by gravel and pecked at by seagulls and red-wing blackbirds and bluejays and even a couple turkey vultures is the week you spend remembering Jimmy exists.

He isn't happy. You have to admit you wouldn't be either. But he also sees it as an opportunity. No longer are you perceived as "greater" - now you are equal. And as equals, Jimmy knows this body better than you. He knows its brain chemistry, its thought patterns, its muscles and nerves and flesh, its idiosyncrasies, he lived it. You saw it in memories, learned a few things in the course of your years, but never have you lived a thing so fully as Jimmy lived that body for years.

The only reason you can hold on for that first week is because you are angry.

That is one thing Jimmy think he is, but he isn't.

Jimmy has never made himself a god. Jimmy has never been brought back just to die again. Jimmy has never had to kill his best friend a thousand times in preparation for when he would have to do it again. Jimmy never believed in a cause as completely as you did.

Because you are an angel.

You are the definition of "determinator."

You were made for orders, and when your orders are self-made, you will follow them because they are the only thing standing between you and insanity. You clung to everything because in reality you had nothing. You realized that a long time ago.

You realized a lot of things before you realized you did.

Jimmy has been angry, Jimmy has hated, but he has never hated with the passion that comes from twenty billion years of existence.

So you hold on using anger. Anger you stored up - not realizing you were doing so - for millennia. And you direct it toward the one external source you can - Metatron. You are sick of self-loathing. This one was all on him. 

And while Jimmy agrees - "that bastard Metatron" - he also reminds you that you chose to do these things. You chose to kill, to steal, to acquiesce to someone else's will simply because they ranked higher than you. You betrayed the cause you fought so long to prove was correct. He calls you hypocrite.

It's the second week - the one that dawns when the railway workers find you curled up and covered in mud and call the police on you, and they bring you to the county jail, where they go through your pockets and can't find anything but your sad, battered cell phone with its three calls to the Winchesters, and call them to come pick you up, and you barely register when they show up because _they took the coat they took your coat that coat may as well have been you and they took the tie and the suit and the shoes and all of these clothes they give you instead FIT but they aren't YOURS_. Your clothes are in a garbage bag somewhere in Michigan.

The second week you relearn how your body works. Jimmy wrestles you for it, and the power struggles are intense, and you have the shakes all the time from it. When you try to do anything more intense than move your eyes - and sometimes even that - the buildup of white noise in your brain, from Jimmy and you fighting for control, is enough to send your body into seizures. You always forget the actual seizure, but when you wake up your tongue always tastes like blood and you have a very distinct scent memory of fresh-grown mint leaves in your mother's garden when you were a boy. When Jimmy was a boy. It doesn't matter at this point, usually, because you are both so exhausted you can't remember why you're separate individuals.

Dean takes to spoon feeding you. You don't mid, but Jimmy recoiled from it because it's degrading and he is a warrior of - no, you are. You try to switch those names. Jimmy doesn't mind, but you do, because - no that's not right. Because it hurts your pride as a self-sufficient warrior, but really you don't mind. Jimmy seems embarrassed but he does admit it's necessary since neither will give mental ground. Dean doesn't seem to mind, although when he looks at you he obviously wants to cry. You aren't sure which you he's looking at, or which one can tell he wants to cry.

Sam reads to you. Mostly pieces of classic literature - Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities. Dean brings you Slaughterhouse-5 and Cat's Cradle and a copy of Homer's Odyssey and Sam reads those to you too.

You find great comfort in the phrase "so it goes." Jimmy does not. And you realize that is the good little soldier part of you - the part that wants to lay down and grovel in front of authority, that wants to beg forgiveness for even the slightest transgression - that likes the phrase and its immutability. It's statement of "this is how it is and you can't change it." The part of you that fought for your free will despises it. It detests its immutability, hates it for the same reasons the other part of you likes it. You aren't sure which of the three factions to follow. There are a lot of you in this old head of yours. You aren't sure who you actually are. Maybe you're all of these versions of personalities this body has worn over the years and has yet to wear. There are, after all, quite a few of you.

Sam and Dean argue over how to sing the songs from the Lord of the Rings books. You don't actually care. You're too busty analyzing story archetypes to care how to sing a song.

The third week is the one where Jimmy gets most of the control. It starts in your toes. You never paid much attention to toes. You knew why they were there and where they had come from but you gave them about the same amount of attention you gave to most things - that is, almost none. You checked if they were there after a battle, at least. You were pretty sure not every angel did.

But he starts in toes and moves up to feet and then to ankles and then knees and hips and stomach and then you stall him just as he begins at fiddling with fingertips.

Jimmy hates the oatmealy mush the Winchesters have been feeding you. To be honest, you don't feel like much else. Everything else takes too much effort.

Jimmy insists on real, solid food. You still control enough of this body to make it impossible to choke anything but the oatmeal down.

The fourth week is the week you take the body back.

It's yours. Jimmy has gone quiet. Not exactly silent, but you didn't expect that. That's too much to ask. You eat your oatmeal on your own without seizures. You begin actually sleeping. Sleeping was another thing you and Jimmy had trouble with. Between the two of you, you would keep the body awake until you were hallucinating, and it was only a matter of time before you just fell over asleep. You spent a while like that.

But now you sleep, and you eat, and you make your own fashion choices. You pick out functional, comfortable clothes. They have lots of pockets. The tan overcoat is replaced with a leather jacket with a dozen pockets inside. In one you keep candy for kids you meet. Most kids don't take the candy. Sam tells you to stop when he explains the "don't take candy from strangers" PSAs.

The fifth week sees Jimmy's disappearance

You tell no one.

The morning you wake up and can find no trace of him. You go to the top of the bunker and cry until you can't anymore, and then you sob tearlessly until dawn.

You miss the voice ten minutes after you realize it is gone.

You never thought you would because you never really liked him listening to every one of your thoughts all the time.

But you miss him

Because he became an integral part of who you were.

You tell no one he's gone.

You assume they thought he was a long time ago.


End file.
